‘The French rehearse there’s only one good part to come out of Belgium and that’s the followers to Paris.’There was a ripple of appreciative laughter.That was the commencing salvo launched by Professor Hans-Jürgen Weisse (Stoneburgh Military Academy’s elder lecturer on politico-criminalistics) as I slipped into the reprove theatre with other latecomers and sought one empty seat at the rear of the aisle.I observed that the lecture was well attended ~ dint of. top brass from Chatham House, supported through Intelligence specialists from associated Defence Staff Colleges, who’d wedged in in the rear our NIGs (New Intake Group); it is a lingering-standing tradition that the IOC (Intelligence Operations Course) of their foremost semester kicks off with Weisse’s keynote readiness.‘Consider this. Whether it’s Brussels or Liège or Molenbeek, from Zeebrugge to the Ardennes a stupor-like officialdom is perceived as tolerating a asylum for paedophilia and child procuration in strong places . . . in other words – as antidote to those initiates new to the arcana of countersubversion operations – this host country, in which Nato and the European Union require each planted their strategic headquarters, grants unfriendly intelligence services the optimum conditions necessary for their ideal hunting grounds productive of subornation and sexual blackmail . . . specifically, the setting of honey-luggage to ensnare corruptible prominent public officials retired to the secrets of the defending of the West.’The darkened auditorium had grown dumb. Inwardly, I registered a twinge of apprehension taken in the character of I became aware that a decidedly unsavoury subdivision was to be essayed, which, to my fixed knowledge, the professor had not till now broached for the IOC curriculum. I feared a defiance from the floor, and suddenly felt compelled to prolong recording in my notebook his vile thoughts verbatim.‘At such a appalling prospect, it our duty to reacquaint ourselves with the fundamentals of the Psychogeography of Espionage . . . because the dedicated agent in search of treason would be wise to seek fully those raffish haunts where the uncircumspect rub shoulders with the demimonde: cafés, cocktail lounges, pubs, adversity clubs, private members’ drinking dens, shady second-rate hotels, Turkish baths, massage parlours, verily the theatre crush bar . . . particularly the bray bar* . . . since it is precisely at these places the targets of the hostiles are known to have ~ing stalked.’

Blackmailers’ tawdry haunts.

A safeness-light on the dais glinted forward the professor’s spectacles so we could not be careful his eyes.

Sybaritic Temptations on the Cheating Side of Town.

‘And don’t give leave to us pretend we are unaware of the well-adapted characteristics of the person of engage destined for an undercover sting. An commission aide is invariably the most vulnerable candidate . . . from chargés d’affaires and younger attachés and cipher clerks to diplomatic couriers and the grow less levels of office functionary, these are the diversity targets on our watch list – sheltered ~ the agency of the confidentiality of the diplomatic sack – whose night-time pleasure-accounts secretly harbour the illicit activities that are their ruin.‘Their own veniality is their ruin – and here’s a alien thing – there is an towards laughable predictability in the manner in that old hands in the diplomatic sport will induct a new arrival – in his rudimentary foreign posting – with the usual guided tour of notorious fleshpots known despite decades to generations of agents as a fledgling’s rite of path on the Cheating Side of Town.‘Few lines of enquiry are besides fruitful than immersion in such a promising psychogeography, with the additional proviso that inclusion in the same proportion that a professed insider on the visitor-lists of exclusive private parties – not to recite orgiastic wild parties [nervous laughter] – direct advance an agent’s penetration of a target’s solitary life more than any imposture viewed like an habitué of louche nightspots perpetually will . . . soused or sober.’There was a grumble of approval from the ranks. Any intimation of a bar bill written from on expenses was reason enough in opposition to the half-attentive, drill-weary NIGs to crepitate alert and punch the air.

Party-goers through Outré Predilections.

Professor Weisse paused only to draw breath – and move water from a carafe – under the jurisdiction, undiscomposed, he sped on.‘But admitting that – as psychogeographers – we are to look after today for typical sites of like sexual predation, to uncover the hidden nexus between hostile agents and the emissaries of political power, then, in all candour, I mouldiness direct you to look at those monuments to anonymity built in the interwar years . . . cities-within-cities . . . I speak, of course, of the urban hall blocks so fashionable in the 1930s – complexes of in addition one thousand self-contained apartments – built without ceasing the scale of ocean-going liners . . . and, like so luxury cruise ships – composed, like they are, of state rooms and steerage – these gigantic blocks of flats continue to endure infinite opportunities for clandestine pleasure-seekers to ill-tempered, unnoticed, the class divide and – figuratively talk – mingle with the upper and the look black decks.’The professor was now speaking without notes and had evidently collision his stride.‘Coming nearer to our possess day and current target locations I can find no better example than the monolithic Thames-sect mansion blocks of London SW1. [Two visiting VIPs muttered by distinct unease.] Actors, playwrights, novelists, journalists, courteous servants, peers, members of parliaments, set apart girls – and, indeed, certain intelligence personnel and nomenklatura from both sides of the Iron Curtain – acquire made these fortress-like communal place of abode places their home, addresses often known ~ means of us to be a magnet on this account that discreet party-goers of more outré predilections, at the same time that well as politicians taking lodgings fit for late-night sittings at Westminster . . . not to cursory reference their convenience for nocturnal assignations involving constant other unnameable late-night recumbent attitudes.’ [Cue very unwell-repressed sniggers from the young NIGs.]A boldness hat harrumphed, and Colonel Rees-Sholter (boss of T-FECS, the Task-Force for European Co-operation and Security) blew his nose through a theatrical flourish that made his distaste unmistakably known.‘I have ~t one intention to moralise, but the incident that such places once harboured the deserter Lord Haw-Haw and fascist Oswald Moseley, and boasted at the same time that tenants the goodtime girls who precipitated the scandals that brought downward Profumo – our Secretary of State towards War, no less – is each illustration analogous to the evident threats our protection services must confront in continental Europe.’An animated young cadet raised his hand by the alacrity of a swot.‘Wasn’t John Vassall – the maritime spy, sir, who worked for the Soviets – arrested in that ~ up at Apartment 807?’‘Lamentably, that is exact, and my regret is intensified by the thought that in the self-same heart of London’s elite, expertly concealed in a unseen drawer, was found not only a Praktina document-copying camera but a subminiature Minox through exposed 35mm cassettes recording over undivided-hundred-and-seventy classified Admiralty and Nato documents . . . the unmingled truth being that this clerical grade civil servant, who lived in acute style on a modest pay vilify while unaccountably possessed of a wardrobes of bespoke Savile Row suits and made-to-apportion gentleman’s silk shirts, had been sexually compromised by a Soviet provocateur when on the prop – may I remind you – of the Naval Attaché at the British commission in Moscow. A classic blackmail fit-up of drunken revels with our chouse drugged and stripped and photographed in the nude embraces of homo-eroticists hired ~ dint of. the KGB.’Another thunderous harrumph from a VIP was a give an inkling of with a crowbar that the professor studiously ignored.

Potential instead of Extortion in Continental Europe.

‘So,’ Weisse continued grimly, ‘at a time of extra upheaval in continental Europe and the picture of mass movements of DPs [displaced persons], not dissimilar the crises of refugees and human trafficking at the accept the offer of two world wars, it have power to be here recorded as a reality of immense significance that such turbulent anarchic conditions are charged with the in posse to sustain the unrestrained abuse of force, conditions which could become – admitting that indeed they have not already be proper for – the forcing-ground for babe abduction and sex-slave rings and harlotry and extortion on a scale indiscoverable since the first half of the highest century.‘There is no additional insidious peril, in my own scan, than that now menacing Europe’s supranational administrative institutions – located in the heartland of Belgium – and there is no more striking exemplification of that full of risk state than the continuing historic return of disturbingly characteristic crime scenes that set bounds to a unique psychogeography, a gravitational lure that has warped a culture to design unimaginable acts of sexual depravity, what one. over time have become symptomatic of a troubled people . . . a nation tainted by multiple child kidnappings and the violation, torture, incarceration and serial murder of abducted young girls, a defame of blackmail and sordid cover-ups allegedly implicating officials of the most senior rank at the highest levels of pan-European governance, judiciary and the national class.’A brooding silence had descended in successi~ the gathering and Colonel Rees-Sholter rose abruptly – his face had darkened, I noticed – and he withdrew hurriedly through the rear exit.

‘. . . attracts them through the prospect of gaudy aperitifs and pastries.’

‘Institutionalised’ Tolerance of the Molestation of Underage Girls.

Professor Weisse, Stoneburgh Academy’s in the greatest degree respected authority on Soviet counter-espionage and inversion, riffled through his notes to the last page.‘That such all-pervading bribery of the sexually-compromised can be exploited by adversaries hostile to Europe’s popular rule of law is a capable of being proved fact, as my earlier cited cases denote, but allow me to call your politeness to some past occurrences of iniquity black spots – in this predicament those crime scenes re-emergent in the city of Liège that may be seen to make known to the recurrences in the national psyche I refer to.’Professor Weisse fixed his sight pointedly on Rees-Sholter’s flow chair and his mouth tightened with a bitter resolve.‘This is ~t any place to provoke controversy but I intend to practise no more than view the facts. Facts that disclose what I would call a political society’s “institutionalised” tolerance of the molestation of underage girls, dating back for the most part a century.‘And may I utter I speak on the incontestable influence of a venerated master criminologist, Nobel Prize nominee, and branch of Brussels’s Royal Academy of French Language and Literature, who in his recollections of his schooldays writes very nonchalantly about the seduction of underage schoolgirls in the ~ional of Saint-Pholien in the Outremeuse tract of Liège at the time of the First World War.‘As a schoolboy, he was acquainted with a sinister matricidal, homicidal second-style of penmanship bookseller, ponce and blackmailer, under the safeguard of the kommandantur of the occupying Germans, who bought govern textbooks from the schoolboy for resale to compeer pupils. This bookseller . . . . . . used to repression young girls in the street and take them into his store with its shutters closed . . . I have power to still hear the hoarse voice of a small quantity girl, the daughter of a product and vegetable merchant: ‘You shouldn’t be delivered of let it happen!’ [With the replication.] ‘He would have denounced me to the Germans . . .’ [At the like time in Liège, a pimp known to this memoirist . . . while renting] a insignificant pied-à-terre not far from the Girls Middle School, looks with~ for the pupils at the going off and attracts them with the show of gaudy aperitifs and pastries. ‘Later, in the in good season 1920s, the German mark catastrophically falls, in the “careless period” of hyperinflation when, as this informer remembers, “you counted marks in millions and billions.”‘The trade rate of the mark and franc meant Belgians crossing the border on the “Swindlers’ trains” to Cologne forward wild shopping sprees saw “the prices changed each hour while you shopped . . .”The memoirist is unjudgemental at the time that he records . . .And the women! . . . And the lads who looked in quest of you, near the [railway] stations, to bring into use you to their little sister! [From this remarkable Belgian writer there are no further agonies of exculpation than . . . ] Should we solicit an explanation in the times? Are there periods of more intense ferment or moments while unhealthy trends are occurring? . . . It was a time, please remember, at the time that they arrested all the pupils in a proxy school because a little girl was dead, a weak girl who had been taken along somewhere by her brother with some boys and used by them completely as a source of experiences . . . a time at the time that not a day passed without the suicide of an adolescent . . . . Under the [German] business, had the [bookseller] been able to indemnify without fear his passion for not nevertheless pubescent girls?. . . satisfying his libido . . . in the back of the shop . . . [Under the occupation] they strained us to cheat, swindle and lie . . . they taught us to take favorable opportunity of shady corners . . . Weisse unfolded a comprehensive handkerchief and, as he mopped his eye~, surreptitiously wiped a tear from his notice. As I have mentioned in my earlier despatches, the professor was in days of yore an agent for the German Federal Intelligence Service, and he had one time told me his father’s clan had lost a fortune in savings in the ill-fated crash of devalued currency that followed the First World War.

‘Should we endeavor to gain an explanation in the times?Are there periods of more intense ferment . . .’

A Little White Slave Trading.

‘So, in my allow view,’ the professor’s voice was hoarse with suppressed emotion, ‘the upshot is irresistible. Morally numbed by the decadence of post-war licentiousness, this Belgian Nobel Prize nominee as a witness to Belgian history is revealed viewed like cooly unjudgemental in his regard according to his friend, the pimp. For, considered in the state of he concedes, the pimp in those amoral seasons was in the business of “a unimportant white slave trading” and “able of persuading a sentimental young maid to take a ship for the Americas . . . while all is said and done it’s all horribly banal.” ’The preservation light on the dais began to flutter urgently, and I saw the colonel construction a ‘cut-throat’ gesture end the glass panel of the exit door. Weisse grimaced.‘I am reminded that my allotted time is running gone, so I shall hastily “dissipated forward” to the present day to interrogate the abrupt question, a question I perpetuate to ask myself: “Is it granted that there are, as our Belgian informer reminds us, unhealthy trends persisting that display themselves in the locus of a criminal psychogeography? And should we map those recurrences viewed like an aid to our operations in contrariwise-subversion?” You, as cautious and adapted to practice thinkers, will I am certain track the answer to this quandary calmly and dispassionately . . . for the persistence of a collective remembrance of degenerate criminality is one that bears the in the greatest degree profound and extended study.‘And I am uttering ~t any special pleading with the false measure of a shallow poignancy when I communicate you now that, just a decade gone, in Liège, not more than a kilometer from home, across the Meuse, from the meeting-house of Saint-Pholien – the neighbourhood of our Belgian beauty-lettrist’s unprincipled reminiscences of prewar condoned babe molestation – the bodies of sum of ~ units young schoolgirls no older than ten were discovered in a calamity drain, raped and strangled.‘As I outlined at the source of my address, our purpose viewed like psychogeographers and criminal profilers today is to be constant to identify and monitor such urban sites of sexual predation and tribute , to uncover the hidden nexus between hostiles and their potential victims in pursuance of unconditionally denying predators the smallest opportunity for the vile exploitation of female sexual subjugation.’At which purpose Professor Weisse, clearly keyed up ~ dint of. his distressing subject matter, bowed and sat into disfavor to be greeted with a chary scattering of applause.

Only afterwards did I obtain certain reservations in defying the Stoneburgh Rule of Non-Disclosure through my intention to reproduce those unspoken passages of the professor’s notes that he had earlier asked me, at the same time that an NRG (Non Regular Personnel), to study in opposition to considerations of conformance to propriety, tenderness and good taste. On the penultimate boy-servant of his lecture notes, he wrote: ‘When you give that the great-grandfather of the brother-in-canon of Her Majesty the present Queen photographed prepubescent schoolgirls covertly in Kensington, contagious them unawares with his sly 45-stage camera, and the implications of the legality of his possessing an estimated 30,000 images, some got with dubious motive, I am ❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ . . . ’ [Redacted ~ dint of. SMA webmaster.]

* A Bad Case (2015), boy-servant 95, Inducement, see below . . .

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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to of literature craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to examine geographically the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes.

look Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-sulphate of morphia.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html and A Bad Case (2015)